Fresh Blog Archive

Posts for March, 2011

Bucks center Andrew Bogut will be out at least one week with a strained muscle in his left rib-cage area, coach Scott Skiles said after the team's shootaround Tuesday morning at the Bradley Center.

Skiles said 6-foot-11 rookie Larry Sanders would start in Bogut's place when the Bucks face the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday night. The Bucks also signed 7-foot center Earl Barron to a 10-day contract to provide some frontcourt depth.

Barron arrived from Memphis and took part in the shootaround, and Skiles said it was possible the 29-year-old could play against the Pistons.

Bogut suffered the injury to his left side in the final 2 minutes of the Bucks' 83-75 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Saturday.

"My understanding is they will re-evaluate him in about seven days," Skiles said. "More than likely that's seven days from when it occurred, so some time this coming weekend they'll take a look at it again and hopefully he'll be ready to go."

Ever since the budget battle erupted in Madison, drawing parallels between Midwest and Mideast protest has proven irresistible to pundits and politicians.

But not to University of Wisconsin graduate student Alex Hanna, who has the rare distinction of personally experiencing the protests in Cairo and Madison back-to-back.

Last month he flew to Cairo to study the role of social media (Twitter, Facebook) in the pro-democracy, anti-government movement in Egypt. Then he returned to Madison just as the battle between Gov. Scott Walker and public employee unions was exploding.

“It’s been a surreal three weeks,” says Hanna, 25, who as co-president of the 3000-member bargaining unit representing university teaching assistants (the TAA) has been in the middle of the Wisconsin protests. He has slept nights in the state Capitol and helped feed the TAA’s “defendwisconsin” twitter account and website, a clearing house of information and updates for protesters inside and outside the Capitol building.

“People keep on making the comparison between Madison and Cairo,” says Hanna, who thinks the parallel is deeply flawed.

The DVD titled "NFL Super Bowl XLV Champions: Green Bay Packers" is to go on sale next Tuesday March 8.

Warner Home Video and NFL Films have produced two versions of the Packers' championship season, culminating in Green Bay's victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl. One version is in standard definition will carry the suggested retail price of $24.98. The other is in Blu-Ray and carries the suggested retail price of $34.99.

Each version contains a highlight compilation of all the Packers' games in the regular season and the playoffs.

According to a press release from Warner Home Video and NFL Films, both the standard def and Blu-Ray DVDs carry these features:

Dane County Circuit Judge John C. Albert will hold a hearing at 2:15 p.m. on a temporary restraining order issued by another Dane County judge Tuesday morning to open the Capitol to protesters

Former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, who sought the order to reopen the building, will be arguing the case on behalf of the protesters and Council 25 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

An attorney for the Wisconsin Department of Justice will appear on behalf of the state.

You’ve heard it said that, OK, public sector pay is, on average, higher than what most of us make out there in the private sector – but government workers are still underpaid. They’ve got more education, you see, and more time on the job, and so they’re paid less once you take that into account. People making this argument cite several studies, including a big one by a union-dominated think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, and another from the University of California-Berkeley.

As has been pointed out, there are some problems with telling people who aren’t earning as much as you that they’re not elevating you high enough above them to suit your superior education. But there are other problems with the unions’ argument.

The problem, Biggs and Richwine point out, is that union-friendly studies undervalue the especially nice benefits we provide. We give government workers pensions, for instance, not 401(k) plans. Even if the same sum goes in, the result is not equal: Pensions guarantee a certain payout (that’s why they’re called “defined benefit”) and that payout imputes a much higher rate of return than investments in 401(k) plans can assume. The promises are bankrupting states left and right, but they are legally enforceable promises and are, as such, worth quite a bit – about 4% more on compensation.

“Another major benefit of public employment is job security. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, on average, a private worker has about a 20% chance of being fired or laid off in a given year. In state and local government, the discharge rate is only about 6%—and several studies have found that public employees are more risk-averse than other workers, meaning they place particular value on job security. We estimate that government job security is equivalent to about a 15% increase in compensation.”

Really, the question isn’t precisely how much over the private sector government workers are paid. This isn’t about envy, after all. The sums matter only because the state is broke, and the way the premium came about matters only in that it shows how collective bargaining raises costs to taxpayers, even in ways that aren’t readily seen.

Amusing bit of ideologizing for the day comes from U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, Democrat from the Twin Cities, who figures she’s found Republican pork. She says she’s out to stop the military from sponsoring race cars.

The New York Times reports that securities backed by commercial real estate loans are on the rise.

"In the last few weeks, a number of big banks have successfully bundled and sold new securities backed by commercial real estate loans. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America completed a $1.55 billion deal last month that included office and retail properties. So far this year, financial firms have sold about $5 billion of commercial mortgage-backed securities, almost as much as was done in all of 2010," the article says.

An e-mailer predicted doom to me the other day, saying that I was promoting the drying up of Wisconsin towns by favoring Gov. Scott Walker’s restrictions on government workers’ union bargaining over health benefits.

My answer to her is worth repeating, I think, because Ms. X fears something apparently lots of other union backers do: “I see teachers leaving all over this state and soon with this budget,” she wrote; “schools closing all over the state and kids having to travel miles and miles just to go to school.” Small businesses” are going to have to shut their doors as they struggle now to make ends meet and depend on teachers and state employees to spend money.”

What’s she’s saying is that unions are valuable not just to their members, who get higher wages, but to the rest of us, too, even though they raise the cost of decent government -- because they bring about pay for teachers that keeps a good workforce in our schools.

Fair enough, but she was saying that without unions, many school districts will so reduce pay that lots of teachers will leave and no one will be willing to replace them – thus the schools closing and the kids traveling miles. Really? There’s evidence, and has been for years, that if anything the supply of would-be teachers outstrips available jobs except in some particular specialties such as math, science or English-as-a-second-language. See this, this, this and this.

The cold reality is that most districts could probably find someone to work for less if they had to.

That's assuming Wisconsin will become an abnormally low-paying state. Any evidence of that? Take a look at what average pay is for public-school teachers -- you can find federal figures here -- and let's take the pay for teachers with 6 to 10 years' experience, a middling number.

Will our teachers pack off to Iowa, another state with high-achieving kids? While the average experienced teacher in Wisconsin makes $40,660 a year in 2008 (the latest figures available), the same teacher in Iowa makes only $34,880. Yes, Iowa has unionized teachers, though the legislature there is also considering whether to restrict bargaining.

Or take a look at Virginia: There, such a teacher makes a little less than in Wisconsin -- $38,270, or about 6% less than in Wisconsin. Virginia, you'll recall, is one of the states that prohibits all collective bargaining for government workers, teachers included. Yet teacher pay is only slightly lower. This suggests that perhaps, in the absence of collective bargaining over health benefits -- remember, Walker's proposal leaves unions bargaining over wages -- teacher pay here won't exactly plummet . . . unless you are inclined to think the worst of your fellow Wisconsinites on school boards.

Remember: For all the talk of Walker's proposal sucking money out of the economy, every dollar that goes into very expensive government-worker benefits comes out of some other Wisconsinite's pocket. It isn't as if that money magically appears to be spent in our towns' economies. It comes from the teacher's neighbors, who have less in their pockets to spend. All that union negotiating does is transfer money from one set of Wisconsinites to another, via taxes. When unions demand the continued power to bargain, they're demanding that this transfer from their neighbors to their own members go on unimpeded.

It's perfectly fair for everyone else to ask whether quite so much should be transferred and whether bargaining is raising that figure too high.